A Pothole, Outsourced IT and Microsoft remote desktop story…
Reading Time: 3 minutes17th February 2022 | Modified: 19th December 2022Categories: Tech News
As in the classic convention of fairy tale storytelling, it typically starts off with a hero or heroine performing a task and then being rewarded. The best of them usually has an insurmountable event and then some magical assistance thrown in for good measure!
The Cast
The Handsome Prince – Who else?
The pothole played by the pothole
The fire breathing dragon – the car relay service
The magical assistance – Microsoft Remote desktop solution
My story is set against the backdrop of the A27. A pothole, my car, a fire-breathing dragon, and a well-known Swedish car manufacturer breakdown service. Whilst the car in the picture is not my car, the pot-hole in question that took out my tire, could have swallowed a 4×4. The glass-shattering bang that came with the tire exploding would have made even the most seasoned SO-19 officers duck down. I was picturing all sorts of damage of course, but I pulled over and parked the car out of harm’s way.
Did I worry? Not at all! It was a sunny day and my car had already sent a text notification automatically, to the breakdown service. I glanced at my watch, it said 11:30 am. No problem I thought, I’ll be back on the road by lunchtime, no need to delay or defer my meetings. But as the day went on.
17:27pm, the breakdown service finally turned up…
I’m sure you can imagine what I thought about that. The absolutely killer line, was when the driver turned up and said:
‘I was just around the corner when I heard your call
come into central despatch, not 10 minutes away, but
they sent me somewhere else’.
So that was my Friday. Six hours waiting for a break down service. Oh, but you ask, what was the bit about outsourced IT, Microsoft remote desktop server App, and the fire-breathing dragon?
It could have been an awful day; all the work I had planned to do. Meetings to have, calls to make, basically life in the office. Technically, I did miss them in the physical sense, but luckily, I had my laptop with me. I switched on the mobile hotspot facility in my car, powered up my laptop and connected to my office files, using Microsoft remote desktop app. To all intents and purposes, it was if I were sitting at my desk in my office.
For my face-to-face meetings I used Microsoft TEAMS, our help desk guys thought it immensely funny to see me sitting by the side of the road with the breakdown service fixing my car tire in the background. The RDS App allowed me full access to all our company files, so that I could work on proposals, create documents, go over various projects, sign off on orders, all without a problem.
So, for my reward – RDS saved the day. I wasn’t at my desk, but it didn’t matter, I had complete and secure access to all the things I needed to do my business. Sometimes, things can go south with your IT or may be some other extenuating circumstances can affect your working day, so it’s good to have a backup plan – where you can work remotely from the cloud, with a software package in place to get your business back up and running just when you run into life’s potholes.
No dragons were harmed in the writing of this story.